PSCO Presentation: 17 February, 2011

“Saints and the doctrine of the ex nihilo: Jewish or
Christian things?”

Virginia Burrus (Drew University)

Presentation

PSCO’s theme “Words and Things” evokes so-called ordinary language
philosophy (one thinks of J L Austin’s 1955 William James Lectures How to Do
Things with Words) and/or its detractors (Ernest Gellner’s 1959 Words and
Things). It may bring to mind not only the linguistic turn but also the
turn to things (Bruno Latour’s 2000 “How to Do Words with Things,” Bill
Brown’s 2001 “Thing Theory”—or, half a century earlier, Heidegger’s “Das
Ding”). What kind of things do the words “Judaism” and “Christianity” do,
when invoked by scholars of antiquity? we are invited to ask. And also:
Is Christianity or Judaism a thing? Alternatively: are there Jewish or
Christian things, and how do we use words to talk about things that are both
Jewish and Christian, that might be both at once, either in their
specificity (“this here thing”—say, the Septuagint) or in their generality
(“that … thing people do”—say, a certain style of exegesis). Much depends,
of course, on how one defines thingliness.

The subtitle of our theme invites us to equate things with objects of study.
Yet arguably the thingliness of things lies largely in their capacity to
exceed or elude linguistic objectification. As Bill Brown puts it, “we
look through objects …, but we only catch a glimpse of things. We look
through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention
makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that
allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as
a window. We begin to confront the thingliness of objects when they stop
working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows
get filthy” (“Thing Theory,” 4). Things draw or provoke language yet they
also withdraw from it: after all, we often call something a “thing” if we
aren’t sure what else to call it. Things may seem to be both here and
absent, strangely immediate and yet also strangely hard to grasp. We tend
to associate thingliness with the most concretely material particularity—a
door knob, a pencil, a jug. Thingliness can also apply to the most abstract
phenomena: as Augustine asks famously, “But what is time? If no one asks
me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone, I don’t know” (Conf. 11.14).

So we might ask: But what is Christianity, what is Judaism? If no one asks
me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone, I don’t know. We have
learned, rightly, to be suspicious of our own categories, of the things our
words do, yet I suspect that most of us still use the words Christianity and
Judaism, with or without scare quotes, quite routinely with reference to
Mediterranean antiquity. The point is not merely that we need some kind of
language if we are to speak at all (a banal enough observation). In fact,
our sources tempt us, for better or worse, with ways of speaking that
dramatize and foreground, and also isolate, questions of identity as
such—that allow Christianness, for example, to take on the status of
thingliness precisely as a performative utterance (Christiana sum!), pushing
at the limits of language from within language, as it were. A certain
slippage between between Christianness as an isolable, self-sustaining thing
(a perception encouraged, even demanded, by our ancient sources) and
Christianness as a contingent object of scholarly discourse — a window to see
with, not a thing-in-itself — is both unavoidable and often problematic, I
suspect.

In this paper, I want to approach the question of the thingliness of
Christianity or Judaism indirectly, by considering the question of Christian
and Jewish things — two things in particular, namely, sainthood and the ex
nihilo doctrine. These are topics I happen to have been thinking about in
the last few years; however, they are not simply randomly chosen for this
talk. Both sainthood and the ex nihilo are generally considered very
Christian-y things from the perspective of late antiquity studies (and not
only from the perspective of late antiquity studies); yet arguably they also
come to characterize what might be considered some of the most Jewish-y
forms of Judaism — that is, Hasidic forms. This paradox invites us to
reconsider our classification of late ancient hagiography and the doctrine
of creatio ex nihilo: might these be Jewish things too, and if so, what
difference, if any, might this make? I will first discuss the hagiography
thing with reference to tales of rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud and tales
of saints in Christian collective hagiographies, then turn to the ex nihilo
thing in Athanasius, Augustine, and Genesis Rabbah.

Presenter

Virginia Burrus is professor of early church history and
chair of the graduate division of religion at Drew University.
For further information, visit her
profile at Drew University.

Meeting and Dining

All are welcome! Those wishing to dine together before the seminar will meet
at 6:00 pm in the Cohen Hall Second-Floor Lounge to go next door to the food court in
Houston Hall.